Once upon a midnight dreary,
Fingers cramped and vision bleary,
System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor,
Longing for the warmth of bedsheets,
Still I sat here doing spreadsheets:
Having reached the bottom line, I took a floppy from the drawer.

Typing with a steady hand,
I then invoked the "save" command
But got instead a reprimand: it read, "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
Was this some occult illusion?
Some manacal type intrusion?
These were choices Solomon himself had never faced before.

Carefully I weighed my options…
These three seemed to be the top ones.
Clearly I must now adopt one; choose: Abort, Retry, Ignore?
With my fingers pale and trembling
Slowly toward the keyboard bending,
Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored

Praying for some guarantee,
Finally I pressed a key.
But what on the screen did I see? Again "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"
I tried to catch the chips off guard -
I pressed again, but twice as hard,
But luck was just not on the cards, I saw what I had seen before.

Now I typed in desperation
Trying random combinations.
Still there came the incantation "Abort, Retry, Ignore."
There I sat, distraught, exhausted,
By my own machine accosted
getting up, I turned away and paced across the office floor.

And then I saw an awful sight
A bold and blinding flash of light
A lightening bolt that cut the night, and shook me to my very core.
The PC screen collapsed and died.
"OH NO! MY DATABASE!" I cried.
I heard a distant voice reply, "You’ll see your spreadsheets…nevermore!"

To this day I do not know
The place to which our data goes.
perhaps it goes to heaven, where the angels have it stored.
But as for Productivity, well,
I fear this has gone straight to Hell.
And that’s the tale I have to tell - your choice: Abort, Retry, Ignore.

Copyright; Lucy Blades